Boil noodles in salted water until tender. The amount of time depends
on the kind of pasta. Check the package. Place half of the noodles in a
servid dish. Sprinkle with half the cheese and half the butter. Repeat
with the remaining halves of the ingredients and serve.

Boccaccio, in his Decameron, describes a mountain of finely grated
parmesan cheese in the mythical land of Bengodi. On the top are people
who make nothing but macaroni and noodles brewed in capon broth. The pasta
is cooked "al dente" and tossed with farm fresh butter before it rolls
down the mountain, gathering parmesan as it goes to its final destination
- the open mouths of the citizens below.

It is rather well known that spaghetti was invented by the Chinese.
The recipe is listed in a cookbook date about 1000 BC. Eventually, the
dish worked its wasy westward to India, where it was called "servika,"
which means thread. It soon worked its way over to Persia, where it was
called "rishta," also meaning thread.

People were eating pasta in Italy at least thirteen years before
Marco Polo returned from Cathay, and possibly as early as the eleventh
century. Many wealthy Italians of the period had Tartar (Mongol) slaves,
who would have been able to prepare this dish for them. From Italy, just
like the Renaissance and the plague, pasta worked its way north to France
and England. Pasta was in England by the fifteenth century. We know this
because thaere are recipes in the Two Fifteenth Century Cookery Books
and The Forme of Cury. A sixteenth century Italian engraving of
a typical kitchen shows people making pasta. The Etruscans developed the
recipe for parmesan cheese. The Romans adopted it because the great wheels
traveled so well.

A menu for a banquet given by Pope Pius V in 1570 lists parmesan
cheese. The recipe for Macrows in The Forme of Cury is what
I would call macaroni and cheese:

"Take and make a thynne foyle of dowh, and kerve it on pieces,
and cast hem on boilling water & seep it wele; take chese and grate
it and butter cast hynethen and above as losyns and serve forth."